Here's my ideas for StP going forward, please read and discuss :)

Hey folks, it's been a minute since I've posted an announcement here... I've been taking a lot of time off from StP to adjust to a post-traveler lifestyle, and I've spent the past two to three years experimenting with various projects; most of which are things I've always wanted to do but couldn't, due to the limitations of living out of a backpack most of the time.

Still, I come back around to the question of what to do with StP every once in a while. I have to admit that my other projects just haven't filled the space left behind since I stopped working on it. Additionally, I've been getting more and more aggravated over the enshitification of the internet as a whole, and how StP might be able to provide a way to help alleviate that, at least for a small community of like-minded folks.

Additionally, I feel a bit conflicted about StP's reputation; on the positive side, it's definitely a household name in punk/alternative circles, which is nice, but also can't seem to shake the 'dirty train hopper' reputation it's had from the beginning; not that I've tried to do anything about that, but it is what it is.

So, in my post-traveler life, I've been wondering how to make StP relevant again to both myself (in terms of motivation to work on it) and the world as a whole, with things on the internet feeling like they're just getting worse all the time.

The conclusion I've come to recently, is to adapt StP to my new interests, while hopefully providing a relevant resource for it's audience at the same time. The specifics of how we do that will largely be up to debate here in these forums, but the general vibe I'm going for is an online space that is more wide-open to general discussion topics from all aspects of life, instead of the more narrow field of travel-related topics StP has become known for.

Broadening the forum horizons

That means opening things up to discussions around a lot of new things, whether it's hiking the great outdoors or discussing your favorite video games. What I picture in my head is a space for radical leftists without everything having to be inherently political. The politics section of the forums will obviously remain, but won't be the focus as it is with the majority of leftist online spaces I'm aware of. I'm shooting for a chill, online space people can hang out at without the usual stresses of our modern-day internet, and that includes intense political discussions; I'm not saying those discussions won't be allowed, just that they won't be a focus of this community. There are sooo many other websites that you can go do that on.

In an attempt to be less vague about what would be on the new site, here's some categories of discussions I've been considering:

• internet/tech privacy
• consumer advocacy
• video games/board games/TTRPGs
• dark web / piracy / download resources

I've written a small 'why we exist' page for this theoretical new space, which you can check out here:

https://monogr.ph/684e14cc8c01b0b006ef094c

and a work-in-progress of some simplified community rules:


I think it conveys the general vibe of what I'm going for and why, but of course it is open to edits/suggestions.

This is obviously a large shift in the direction of the StP community. It's going to take a lot of re-arranging of the current forum areas we have so far. Some will stay the same, others, may get removed or merged into other sections. I'm looking for volunteers if you're interested in helping us move things around.

Name Change...?

Personally, I'm under the opinion that a change this big potentially warrants a change in the name of the community itself. I have struggled with this for years, trying to think of a new name/concept that had a domain (i.e. a dot com style url) available, and I got pretty close to a few ideas, but I recently ended up settling on the name, AnarchoBot.

Specifically, https://anarcho.bot

You'll notice that at the time of this writing, I have not moved the site over to this domain yet, since I imagine this is going to be the most controversial decision here, and I expect some push back, and that's okay. Let me know your thoughts. I want to be sure I'm making the right decision here.

Why not just keep the StP name? Why AnarchoBot?

I have a list of reasons for the name change, but specifically, I didn't entirely want to ride off the popularity of the StP name, since this will largely be a 'reboot' of the community into something new. Also, the reputation StP has for being a 'train hopper' site seems less relevant if we're going in this new direction. I also like the shorter name, and it's distinct enough that folks would be able to find it in an internet search. I'd also like to preserve all the posts that have been made in this community over the last 25 years without having to run/pay for two sets of software/hosting/etc.

Lastly, I thought it would be kinda fun to have a little mascot for the community:



What will happen to the current forums?

To be clear, nothing from the old/current StP site is going away. I have no plans to remove content, just to re-arrange things in a way that feels right for this shift. I am expressly committed to preserving as much forum content as possible.

This will mean moving a lot of posts in say (for example) the Van Dwelling section and moving it into a broader 'traveling' category, and using tags so folks can drill down to posts about that subject. Essentially, using tags as a wider 'sub-category' for organizing information relevant to readers.

Of course, this is all negotiable, and I'm open to hearing everyone's opinions and possible alternative ideas on how to accomplish all this. I'm sure some folks will have some ideas I haven't thought of, so I'd love to hear them.

The Roadmap

Assuming my train of thought here isn't wildly off base or just a terrible idea from someone who is out of touch with the StP community, I envision the transition plan would look like the following:

• One mass email to let everyone know about the upcoming changes.
• Waiting 2+ weeks for debate and for folks to chime in or login to the site if they haven't in a while
• Deleting all user accounts that have not logged into the site in more than six months
• Close all open registrations, and go 'invite only' until a (yet undermined) date in the future
  • (anyone with an active account at that point can invite other users)
• Begin reconstruction / re-arrangement of message board, discord server, etc.
• Work on website design, add better moderation tools, etc.
• Update domain from squattheplanet.com to anarcho.bot and redirect any relevant domains

I have a few reasons for going 'private' with the site. Mainly:

• I would like to work with a small set of invested individuals interested in having a big say in what/how things should change. I feel like this will be a better, more focused approach rather than just letting any random person from the internet pull things off track.
• AI has completely indexed pretty much every page of StP at this point (AI bots are often the biggest drain of resources on the server) and that annoys me. I do feel AI has it's place, but most (90%) of it is legalized corporate theft. Closing the community would block those bots entirely. What we would do about those in the future (see below) is up for debate (maybe a tarpit?).

Of course, there will be a few cons to going private in this way; obviously, this will kill StP's search engine ranking, but frankly, I'm not really concerned about that. Google has been one of the biggest ways new users find us, but I'd like to start this new era by focusing on quality over quantity with a set of invested users, then possibly open things up to the public at a later date. As stated above, I'd like to give users the ability to invite people so we can keep the community focused while still being able to bring in new users.

Of course, who knows, maybe we find that staying invite-only works best for us. I suppose we'll see somewhere further down the road.

Far-Horizon Ideas

I'd like to touch on a few ideas that are important to me, but will take several steps to get everything in place to make them happen. Still, when they do happen, I feel like these will be (new) core features of the community:

• Weekly Voice Chat -- Bringing back an old favorite! We used to gather every week on Wednesdays to just chat and bullshit about whatever. It lasted 5+ years until it fizzled out, and sometimes folks still jump into the dedicated discord channel on that day... I'd like to bring that back, maybe a bit more organized this time around.
• Music/Books/Movie discussion areas -- Dedicated/special areas for book/music/movie discussions using special plugins for automatically fetching/scraping media information. See examples here and here.
• PeerTube -- Setting up a PeerTube instance to host videos and tutorials that would definitely get us banned from YouTube (i.e. how to videos on piracy, etc). PeerTube also supports livestreaming, so doing things like movie nights or educational teach-ins is definitely a possibility.
• Wiki -- I've been wanting a real, useable wiki for this community for what seems forever (see FMHY.net for an example of what I'm going for), but there has always been technical hurdles that kept anything we tried from being actually useful to people. Hopefully the Single Sign On feature of Xenforo will open up the ability for us to use other software (wiki.js, peertube, etc) without the need for users to create multiple accounts.
• Etsy/Merch -- Something to help with the bills or to help promote the community (patches/shirts/etc). I know some creative folks that have wonderful ideas that might become a part of this project in the future.
• DIY Marketplace -- A space where folks can trade/buy/sell crap with other users. Maybe the site gets a 5% take on the transaction or something.
• Monthly support model -- I would like to eventually implement some kind of support model (most likely in-house, not using patreon/kofi/etc), where folks can subscribe monthly and get perks for their support to the community. I know this can get touchy, so to be very clear, there will be no forum content gating; all perks will be either cosmetic (emotes, profile customization, etc) or give access to small supporter-only areas like a personal music streaming server or other things I might be experimenting with.

You talked a lot about the fediverse in the past, what happened to that?

The short version is that I still love the concept of the fediverse, but unfortunately after many hours of testing various kinds of software in my spare time, there doesn't seem to be a real solution for plugging message boards into the fediverse in a practical way. I'm keeping an eye on it though. Maybe once that particular aspect of the tech matures, we'll have access to the wonderful integration the fediverse/activitypub offers. In the meantime, we'll have to make due with the options we have in the XenForo forum software.

Okay, time for your feedback!

I'm sure I'm missing a few things, but that's the bulk of my thoughts on this. Feel free to let me know what you both like and dislike, as I'd like to get constructive feedback in both of those directions, if possible. Thank you for your time, and I hope all this work results in a truly great community that will help folks now and into the future.

Matt

I like all that you have proposed, with the exception of the one change that you stated would be the most controversial.
Anarchobot will bring many more serouus rumors and reputation issues than previous.
Some of that attention may be from places and organizations that many people would likely stay away from all together.
A more "neutral" name would be my only suggestion going forward.
Either way, I'll be there.

I love these ideas! I love the name too. I'll be around more now, planning on a trip to Anchorage via Portland and Seattle...
Anarcho road trip

We've talked about a bunch of this stuff before. From my perspective StP isn't really a collective-owned forum, so at the end of the day i'll defer to whatever our benevolent dictator and responsible maintainers think is best. Everyone is different, so what works for some people won't work for others, and as a person with power no matter what you decide it risks disappointing or alienating some group, that's just how it is.

My main areas of concern are around the loss of public access information and creating a gated community.

As long as all of the old information is still publicly available - invites or no - i think that's the number one most important thing. People who contributed here in the past were sharing their ideas, their knowledge, their hopes, their doubts... their stories with the broader community. That's a history that would be sad to lose. Even if parts of it are still available in Wayback Machine or encoded into large language models, we know from archaeology that the more copies of a thing exist the better - decentralization aids resilience. For the comrades who passed away... their memory lives on in places like StP. Locking the doors and not allowing anyone in unless they can prove membership is a dealbreaker for me. I won't contribute to a gated community, period.

The other thing i personally dislike is "invite only" structure. There are some forums that operate in this way - one that comes to mind for me is lobste.rs, which is a tech forum. The benefit of having an "invite tree" is that you can clip entire branches of the tree when it turns out they are abusive. On the other hand, it makes people who don't already have an established social network less likely to contribute. In lobste.rs case you can go on IRC and try get to know people before asking them for an invite, which already feels stressful to me as someone who prefers asynchronous communication, but with StP that'd be even worse because it funnels people in the direction of Discord, which is a VC-funded big tech company that forces users to leak their phone number just to sign up. There are several sites i read but don't contribute to because the barrier for entry is too high. That's a risk, if the goal is to try get more people to contribute.

I think if StP is moving away from being a space where kids, unhoused people, people on the fringes of society etc can find refuge, then i guess it's reasonable to expect anyone showing up at the door to have a good reputation... but that might also mean that we lose those marginalized voices. On the other hand, i am an old curmudgeon who still cares about this nerdy online privacy shit. It might be that most young people and folks who are less politically interested already have a Reddit account or a Discord or whatever other mainstream social media presence and thus will have no problem proving their identity. But, then, why would they bother to join here at all, if they already have those other places to chat? I dunno, because i don't have accounts over there. I guess that makes me out of touch.

On the positive side.... I can't remember if i shared slrpnk.net here before, but that's an example of a Lemmy instance which is leftish/anarchist-y and people talk about similar topics to here, except from a housed-up/homesteading context. Personally i dislike that upvote/downvote style of forum because i think it encourages karma farming and vapid contributions so i've never signed up there, but i still read it from time to time and think it would be cool to have a space to discuss those things more deeply. AnarchoBot (odd name, but whatever - we'd all end up calling it AB anyway) could be that! The hard part will be building up enough of a core crew to contribute, and that's a tough mountain to climb. We could've been talking about that stuff here already in one of the non-travel forums, but we're not, so... If a rebrand is the thing that somehow gets new people excited to visit and contribute, sure, why not?

Btw, one tool you can try to use to block AI crawlers is Anubis. Seems like a pretty popular option for smaller sites, plus it's free and open source.

Oh, and another point coming from the tech side... In my experience being involved with these sorts of projects at work, deactivating accounts even with over a year of inactivity will upset folks. I imagine that's even more the case for StP where there might be more than average number of people in trouble with the law or in situations where they can't easily get online. I would suggest giving a longer grace period than just 2 weeks before taking action, and then then first deactivating the accounts in a way that allows people to recover them for ~6 months ahead of actually deleting them. I don't know if StP users will have the same response as the users of places where i worked, but generally it seems if you can afford to do it engineering-wise it's better to err on the side of caution when it comes to removing legit accounts with historical activity. (Bot accounts on the other hand, who cares.)

@Matt Derrick you've created a community and there's a large chunk of it that will follow wherever you lead. As Ali pointed out, it seems important to maintain a public-ish archive. Having that continuity between old & new is going to help with member retention. With the train hopping example, perhaps it is enough to limit the forum to stories and journal entries. This would force the sharing of technical resources and self-aggrandizing to other places, like the discord. The community is still there representing that traveling lifestyle, but it's reduced to a segment of the whole.

I'm unsure about how much it got used, but I miss the StP marketplace. I used it three times - I got a pair of boots, sent a backpack to someone in need, and I tried to sell a book about train hopping then Creature gave my ad a poop emoji. Just the chance that those of us done with travel for a while might have gear laying around to share is enough to make it worth bringing it back if it helps somebody in need. It's also a neat timecapsle of travel gear and related objects.

The zenforo demo links in the media section are sharp looking. Seems like a great format to allow folks to discuss the media posted to the site whether it was media people recommend or pdfs in the documents section. I was looking through those books the other day and this would really clean that up visually too.

Finally, I'm with Ali on the public access. I wonder if you could slowly impliment the tarpit rather than cut access off with the hopes of restoring it in the future? Having said that, I'm looking at it from a community retention & expansion angle. All kinds of interesting things could happen if you add limitations.

I guess my thoughts are to be frank, it seems like shutting the doors on STP, and that's alright man.
Seems like rebranding the site a different name andchanging the overall subject matter focus will not make STP drastically different, but will create something new and STP will be no more.
I think the problem is this site is an interest project and your interests have shifted, which happens in life.

For sites to continue, they have to be for profit, communities that are a part of a larger organism (like a sub-reddit), ran by people with a heavy continuing interest, or sold to someone else. Well being a site for dirty train hoppers and fringe travelers pretty much rules out profit and selling it I think, I've liked that this isn't reddit, and it seems your interests are shifting, so what do ya do?

I've really really appreciated the effort you've put into this site and the book you made. We're both from the same hole in Idaho, and there's not a whole lot to be proud of there. But I've gotten some hometown pride out of telling local travelers that the dude who made STP is from there, so thanks for that.

Groups and communities that are adjacent to the fringe traveler scene come and go. They spring up in cities and then fizzle out and then somebody in a nieghboring city starts something similar and maybe that will fizzle out or last a while. I think it's ok if this site is a similar organism. Fringe travel will always be a thing, especially with the van-life culture now, and especially with the dystopia that I think a lot of us feel like we are headed into. Maybe somebody will take up the torch and build a whole new site for the hitchhikers and train hoppers. Maybe they won't and fringe travel will become something entirely different. Thats alright. If the world needs it bad enough it'll happen.

I guess I say all this to say that I completely understand that ya don't want to pay to host two separate sites, and if ya wanna do this other project I'll pop by and check it out. Sounds like a cool project. I hope ya haven't felt like you've needed to carry the torch for an alternative space this whole time or for too long.

My initial thought for an appropriate ending is I think you should post up the site like it was for a month and say your passing on to whoever feels like they can handle it, but I suspect that has already been tried to a degree? I wouldn't want to see it go away but ya gotta do what ya gotta do, and I have some worry about it being handed over to just anyone.

So my final thought...is there a way the STP URL could still direct to your site? Or would that essentially require you paying for two domains?
I would love it if the STP URL still directed to one page that just said STP is not maintained anymore and is not an open forum, had a quick blurb about the history, and a link to download the archive or had an archive to search through. And then a link to your new project. That way people that find your book out in the wild could still get some use out of it. Not anything crazy or an open forum, but just some kind of archive and history and maybe some links to similar projects still going. I would say just hella simplify it and keep it separate from the new endeavor, but maybe that wouldn't be possible without two domains? IDK. If it takes two domains, how much would that cost?

Anyways, cheers to STP.
Whatever happens, it's been real.

Oh and also, I hope the STP discord can stick around as is. I think that kinda runs itself, right? I like the discord and hope it can stick around. I think that would be a good way for STP to continue if possible.